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By Root 20189 0

Taming of The Shrew’ in direct references to persons and districts familiar to Shakespeare. Two amusing scenes pass at the house of Justice Shallow in Gloucestershire, a county which touched the boundaries of Stratford (III. ii. and V. i.) When, in the second of these scenes, the justice’s factotum, Davy, asked his master ‘to countenance William Visor of Woncot against Clement Perkes of the Hill,’ the local references are unmistakable. Woodmancote, where the family of Visor or Vizard has flourished since the sixteenth century, is still pronounced Woncot. The adjoining Stinchcombe Hill (still familiarly known to natives as ‘The Hill’) was in the sixteenth century the home of the family of Perkes. Very precise too are the allusions to the region of the Cotswold Hills, which were easily accessible from Stratford. ‘Will Squele, a Cotswold man,’ is noticed as one of Shallow’s friends in youth (III. ii. 23); and when Shallow’s servant Davy receives his master’s instructions to sow ‘the headland’ ‘with red wheat,’ in the early autumn, there is an obvious reference to the custom almost peculiar to the Cotswolds of sowing ‘red lammas’ wheat at an unusually early season of the agricultural year.

The kingly hero of the two plays of ‘Henry IV’ had figured as a spirited young man in ‘Richard II;’ he was now represented as weighed down by care and age. With him are contrasted (in part i.) his impetuous and ambitious subject Hotspur and (in both parts) his son and heir Prince Hal, whose boisterous disposition drives him from Court to seek adventures among the haunters of taverns. Hotspur is a vivid and fascinating portrait of a hot-headed soldier, courageous to the point of rashness, and sacrificing his life to his impetuous sense of honour. Prince Hal, despite his vagaries, is endowed by the dramatist with far more self-control and common sense.

Falstaff.

On the first, as on every subsequent, production of ‘Henry IV’ the main public interest was concentrated neither on the King nor on his son, nor on Hotspur, but on the chief of Prince Hal’s riotous companions. At the outset the propriety of that great creation was questioned on a political or historical ground of doubtful relevance. Shakespeare in both parts of ‘Henry IV’ originally named the chief of the prince’s associates after Sir John Oldcastle, a character in the old play. But Henry Brooke, eighth lord Cobham, who succeeded to the title early in 1597, and claimed descent from the historical Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard leader, raised objection; and when the first part of the play was printed by the acting-company’s authority in 1598 (‘newly corrected’ in 1599), Shakespeare bestowed on Prince Hal’s tun-bellied follower the new and deathless name of Falstaff. A trustworthy edition of the second part of ‘Henry IV’ also appeared with Falstaff’s name substituted for that of Oldcastle in 1600. There the epilogue expressly denied that Falstaff had any characteristic in common with the martyr Oldcastle. Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man. But the substitution of the name ‘Falstaff’ did not pass without protest. It hazily recalled Sir John Fastolf, an historical warrior who had already figured in ‘Henry VI’ and was owner at one time of the Boar’s Head Tavern in Southwark; according to traditional stage directions, the prince and his companions in ‘Henry IV’ frequent the Boar’s Head, Eastcheap. Fuller in his ‘Worthies,’ first published in 1662, while expressing satisfaction that Shakespeare had ‘put out’ of the play Sir John Oldcastle, was eloquent in his avowal of regret that ‘Sir John Fastolf’ was ‘put in,’ on the ground that it was making overbold with a great warrior’s memory to make him a ‘Thrasonical puff and emblem of mock-valour.’

The offending introduction and withdrawal of Oldcastle’s name left a curious mark on literary history. Humbler dramatists (Munday, Wilson, Drayton, and Hathaway), seeking to profit by the attention drawn by Shakespeare to the historical Oldcastle, produced a poor dramatic version of Oldcastle’s genuine history; and of two editions of